Agents: Not so Perfect
by Stormhawk
Summary: Brown-centric fic. Agent Brown remembers the first 'one', he did not escape the Matrix on his own. He had help.


**Title: **Not so perfect****

**Author:** Stormhawk

**Rating: **PG

**Disclaimer: **

Matrix universe and associated characters: Wachowski brothers. 

Agents universe: co-owned by me and Mordax. 

Carlson and Tarquin: Me

**Word Count: **3790****

**Summary: **The first man out of the Matrix didn't get out there on his own, he had help.

**Notes: **This is the Brown-centric piece I promised.

This was going to be brought up in a fic before this but I'm writing this one first so here goes. 

The world in the Matrix started in 1800, the machines chose this year so that they wouldn't have trouble with hackers and the net for a while (for the very least about a hundred or so years) and they could stabilize after the war. Damn the Wachowski brothers for not stating some things implicitly, then again this is fan fiction, we create what we don't have.

I didn't want to start quite so early but if the Matrix has been running for about two hundred years and it's basically today it must have started back then. I would have stated it was on some sort of century-long loop if it hadn't been for Whitman. Dates mentioned around her have kind of screwed any chance of a loop. 

Please don't flame me. 

Sorry this took so long but I HATE Agent Brown, he's so damn hard to write. For those of you who haven't read it, might I also suggest 3 am by Mordax. 

This is for you Daidouji, you've wanted a Brown-fic so I wrote it, then again he did need some development. 

I'm still not telling what 002 is so don't ask. 

**Please read and Review.**

"Sir – please help me," the injured recruit said from the ground. A rebel had shot him and he was bleeding from a hole in his gut.

Brown sneered; it was just a recruit – just a battery, just another pointless human.

"You should have been able to avoid that bullet," he said, that was why they went to the trouble of training recruits, so they wouldn't be shot.

"People aren't perfect – you need to realize that." Brown stopped and blinked, had that recruit actually just said that. No one told him what to do. Except the mainframe.

"Humans are not perfect. Humans are the essence of imperfection."

"If you know that then why…" the recruit, Recruit Joel Tare, spat some blood up. His suit was now nothing but a mess.

Reluctantly shifting them both to the medical facility within the agency, he let the doctor deal with the recruit as he left. Briefly stopping in his office to file a report of the incident he continued onto his private training facility.

Humans were far from perfect, that's why he hated working with them. Recruits, why did they need recruits?

Humans were not perfect but programs could be.

He certainly was.

Unlike Jones who had become an…addict, something that irritated him – that an agent could sink so low, and Smith whom Brown often silently questioned, he was the perfect agent. 

He did exactly as the mainframe requested and nothing more. He took out the rebels by any means necessary; he didn't unnecessarily complicate his existence. 

He was what all agents should be. 

But he knew the sad truth was that most of his colleagues over the digitized globe were not as perfect as he.

But even so, the other agents performed as expected, as they needed to. 

Which was why he wondered about Project 002.

Smith had brought it up at a conference a few weeks ago. He had noticed Jones reacting to the mention of it so he knew the technical agent knew what it was, so he had made the technical agent inform him of the details that he knew.

Of course there had been mistakes over the years, none of which was his fault but it certainly wouldn't warrant what 002 promised.

That was, of course, if the project was going to be initiated or the file had just been floating around loose. 

Well, maybe he wouldn't be included because he had never been subject to any sort of imperfection. Yes, he was a version two, but that was not his fault.

Neither was Carlson his fault.

_Agent Carlson_, he thought bitterly as he started to pound the sandbag that hung in the middle of his private training area. Carlson, as so many things, had been a mistake.

But it had been a very long time ago. At the beginning of their existence. They had been brought online to destroy a man who had somehow found out about the Matrix.

How that was possible, they were to this day still unsure, it had probably been that damned Oracle that the human prisoners had mentioned. It wasn't bad enough that she was an exile; she also had to betray the machines to the humans on a daily basis by helping them and hiding them.

Then they had been brought online. They were far from the first programs to be brought online by the mainframe and they were certainly not the last but they were the best. Adaptable, given time and written as the perfect law enforcers for the system.

Agent Brown himself had been the second agent brought online, a fact he was proud of. Smith had been the first and Jones the third but of the original three he was the one who had stayed the closest to his original programming. 

The man fled their city so three more agents had been brought online, Agents Ritter, Carlson and Adams. They were almost exact copies of the original three, slight adjustments to their physical attributes so they were not seen as the same. 

Humans were often suspicious of similar things, and it was infeasible to suppose that the six men were in fact three sets of twins. Too much of a coincidence and humans were suspicious of strange coincidences and they already had a human problem.  

Agent Brown should had been suspicious of Carlson the first time he saw him, but he wasn't, as he hadn't had cause to be yet – that would come later. Suspicion was a trait of the combat agents. They looked like enough to be brothers and he had heard that comment more than once while they were searching for _that human,_ as they had started to call him.

His name however was Abel Tarquin. He had been working as an accountant at a general store. The job paid well and he was quiet, at least that's what his file said. Then one day his pattern of behavior had changed and he had started to miss days at work. 

His pattern resumed to almost normal after a traveling circus had passed through. Further investigation into the matter had revealed that he had come into contact with an exiled program. Other visitors to the circus informed the agents that she had been calling herself the Oracle. 

Carlson had been the one ordered to seek out the Oracle and reveal what she had told Tarquin then destroy her. 

He had made contact with her but his report read. "Exile was not destroyed due to interference. The interference was caused by another exile acting as a bodyguard. The guard (Program: (NA-E) 675-3847) was destroyed. 

After that Carlson had never been the same. 

It wasn't apparent at first, only small variances in behavior. But since they were the first none were quite sure what variances in behavior were acceptable and which weren't. As a model agent, Brown never displayed any variances. 

The man was spotted several more times before finally one night he showed his strength. No one was quite sure where his abilities came from or if they were just a glitch but he had them. 

One dark night he had revealed, for a few fleeting seconds at least the sky over the city as it truly was. Code. A wide expanse of scrolling code. As it was night, and a cold one at that many were inside so not everyone saw it, many outside did and were alerted to the fact that something strange had happened. 

Jones and his counterpart had come up with an idea that partially covered the event; they required and released a large number of fireworks into the night sky so that many would assume that it had merely been part of the display. 

Carlson had spotted the man and had pursued him. Brown had been confident that it would end that night, that there would be no more problems. Had he ever been wrong, it was the start of the war that night.

The war that was still raging nearly a century and a half later. 

Two hours later there was one less human and one less agent in the Matrix. Carlson had 'freed' (though the word had not yet been coined) them and taken them both into the real world. The mainframe was silent, it had not seen this as a possibility – nothing like it had ever happened before. 

There had been no rabbit holes, no red pills, no Alice in Wonderland – none of the idiosyncrasies that existed with the rebellion today. Just one anomaly and one traitorous agent.

Since it had been the second set of agents that Carlson had come from the others were immediately deleted, broken down and their codes recycled. They were never heard from again. Carlson however was a different matter, it was far from the last time they would hear from him again.

A machine had helped a human. And because of his doppelganger Brown had always felt some infinitesimal fault for the war. But the imperfection was not his fault, it was Carlson's – he was still perfect. 

Neither Carlson nor Tarquin were heard from for a year. They had assumed that they were both dead, how could a human possibly survive in a world like the one that was left?

Were they ever wrong.

Smith, Jones and Brown had been assigned a building, the Agency; for all their future activities in case that any others became aware of the Matrix. Jones was put in charge of pinpointing anomalies and fixing glitches within the Matrix and the like. Brown, however was assigned the task of hunting down and destroying exiles.

Exiles of the system – coward programs that had refused to accept the will of the mainframe and had run away instead of being deleted as they were ordered as a better program had been written to replace them.

He was good at destroying exiles.

After a particularly violent encounter with an exile – who had been destroyed – Brown's earpiece crackled to life. It was Jones. 

^There is an unknown anomaly in your area. Report any observations.^

"Acknowledged." Brown said, looking around. There was nothing out of order, a body but that was nothing strange when he was around, and some telegraph wires. 

Then something happened. A human appeared. From nowhere.

Agent Brown blinked.

How was that possible? Looking closer as the man approached him he immediately recognized him – Tarquin. 

Dropping his empty revolver and requiring another he fired the six shots at the man. Tarquin smiled, and held out his hand, the bullets stopped in midair then dropped to the ground.

_How did he do that? _Brown wondered as the human walked toward him. "I'm not just any human anymore." He said with a sneer. 

"You are an anomaly – nothing more." Brown replied as he lunged at him. Tarquin was fast, very fast. Too fast. Too fast for some human, he was different. 

"He is the one Brown. Accept it," a shadow of his own voice said. Turning away from the human he saw Carlson. He no longer wore an earpiece and he was much more…human. A traitor and a mistake. Brown told him so.

"I am no traitor," his doppelganger spat at him, "the human race deserves to be free."

"They are nothing but a power source."

"How little you understand. The machines will lose this war."

"You need to be deleted."

Carlson's face split open into a smile, "I am no longer a part of this system, you can't touch me."

Apparently Carlson was unaware of the exiles, "that is wrong." 

After a short fight between the agent and the ex-agent, Tarquin joined in and sent Brown flying. Stunned, the combat agent lay on the ground and witnessed the second exit. 

Tarquin held his two pointer fingers together and then drew them apart to draw an invisible line, he was manipulating something. Looking upward to follow the human's gaze he saw the telegraph wire turn to code for a moment then return to normal. Tarquin nodded to Carlson who jumped and grabbed the cable. The abnormality then held his hands down at his sides and lifted himself off the ground. Raising himself effortlessly up, he grabbed the wire and disappeared.

Brown returned to the Agency and reported all of this to his fellow agents. 

They were both shocked and intrigued, shocked of course that Carlson was a bigger traitor and threat than they had anticipated and intrigued by the processes that they had used to enter and exit the Matrix. Also, they were curious as to how they were getting in and out of the Matrix and how Tarquin had survived this long in the wasteland that was the real world. 

They wouldn't have the answer until months later. Both Carlson and Tarquin showed themselves many times but then the disappearances started. More and more people were leaving the Matrix; he was 'freeing' them. A word they had heard him use in their brief fights.

To cope with this new and growing threat to the system, more agents were brought online. Teams of three in the major cities of the world were created. Unlike Ritter, Carlson and Adams, they were not copies and were written specifically, and were also created to blend in with the local population so they were not noticed.  

More and more humans disappeared over the next decade – the agents called them the rebels even though they called themselves the resistance, would leave messages around to plant ideas in people's minds. 

They would pin notices to public message boards, paint words onto condemned buildings and write ads in the newspapers. About the only thing the agents could do was cut the telegraph wires in common areas that they were spotted in. 

They would immediately go after anyone that showed an awareness of the Matrix. Sometimes this awareness was stemmed from the memories they had of the night the sky turned to code. Sometimes it occurred because of something else that they had seen.

The persons 'freed' were mostly under thirty, a few older people had been taken but were never heard from again. Some of the rebel activity was inexplicable until they captured one of them.

The agents had their first prisoner. 

He refused to give them any information while still in control of his mind, however under the influence of a serum he easily broke. 

He told them everything they wanted to know.

It had been Carlson who had known the way to escape the Matrix; where he had come across this information was unknown but that didn't matter, what mattered what that it was done. 

As this information was revealed and relayed to the Mainframe the more suspicious it grew of Agent Brown as it wasn't quite sure if they fault had been with the copying process or with the original program – being the combat agent. 

This was why Brown did not act out of his parameters, he was not the cause of the imperfection, it was not his fault.

He was still perfect. 

Tarquin had been physically weak; a lifetime of not moving had caused his muscles to atrophy. Carlson had brought him to one of the old medical facilities, those used at the end of the war to repair the survivors – the first plugged in. It was an easy job for the equipment to rebuild the muscles. 

Carlson was clever, too clever for a relatively new program. Where he had come across the information for all of this was unknown. Brown suspected the Oracle. Not an unreasonable guess considering after he had been in contact with her was when his aberrant behavior had started.

There had been a simple foodstuff fed to the humans being repaired, it was also fed to the crop-children before their bodies could handle liquefied humans. It was grown in vats and sufficient for humans to live on. 

After freeing a dozen more humans they had moved from the facility for they were worried about being found out. Taking everything with them that the machine could handle, they left. The machine had been designed for carrying loads of metal but once reprogrammed it acted as a transport. They escaped into the sewers of the old cities.

There were vast caverns near the earth's core, the only warm place left in or on the earth since the humans had blackened the sky, their last desperate effort before losing the war. And for ten years they had been freeing minds and cannibalizing technology for their 'city' Zion. 

The rebellion now had about a thousand members and for the first time in over half a century humans were being born in the real world. 

They had started to build ships so they could hack into the Matrix from safer locations. The machines had known about these ships so they had created the sentinels.

The sentinels were killing machines, designed to seek out humans and their ships. Unfortunately, they sometimes escaped or even managed to destroy the sentinels using an EMP. The EMP was dangerous to all active machinery, the inactive sentinels were then torn apart and used for however they saw fit. 

Tarquin had entered the Matrix in order to try and save the captive. By the time he got the Agency however, the man was dead and the agents were waiting for him.  

Tarquin was shot dead.

Carlson arrived a moment later, a moment too late. At least, he thought so. They all did.

It was then that they were privileged to see something amazing, something incredible and supposedly impossible. 

Abel Tarquin came back to life. 

He stepped forward, now more confident than ever in his abilities – he had come back to life after all. He smiled and stepped forward to destroy the agents. Then he fell forward like a puppet whose string had been cut. 

He was dead, this time for good. The sentinels had found his ship – the Genesis. 

The agents stood triumphant for a moment, without emotions of course, before looking to Carlson. Since he had hacked in just like a human he should have fallen as well. Instead, he stood as though in a glitch before shaking himself back to life.

A human dies in the Matrix if their body is destroyed because they need their body, it was different for Carlson as he was a program, he existed wherever he was for that was where his program was. 

He took one final look at the other agents, his old allies then ran. Brown was quicker off the mark than the others and ran after the program that was now an exile as well as a traitor. He got off a couple of shots that almost hit him, then rounding a corner he found him gone. 

Carlson had simply disappeared. 

How that had happened the agent wasn't sure, he suspected it had something to do with the fact that Carlson was now an exile. Exiles had sometimes disappeared after being out of sight for only a few seconds. One day he would learn their secrets and then he would cause their downfall.

And he would find and destroy Carlson.

Something, Brown realized bitterly as he shook himself from his memories as he pummeled the bag of sand, that he still hadn't managed to do after all of these years. Carlson was extremely good at hiding himself, he hadn't caught more than fleeting glances in all the time he had been hunting him. 

Punching the bag again his fist went straight through it. He took a step back and watched the sand pour down onto the floor. 

He sighed; a reaction agents weren't programmed to have. He wished he didn't have _human_ reactions like he did, they were signs of weakness. A sign that even after all he had tried he wasn't perfect. Brown shook his head, he was perfect, the reactions that he had were simply part of the subroutine that allowed agents to better fit in with the humans they had to work around.

At least now with 002 in play he finally understood why all of the mainframe's experiments had taken place. He hadn't understood why (not that he had questioned it) it had insisted in making them seem more human when it frowned upon these sorts of things when they appeared spontaneously.

Then again, maybe it was evolution and not spontaneity.

Evolution for programs was a mistake; they were supposed to act within their parameters and only within those parameters. They were not supposed to evolve. Evolution was the means by which programs made the choice to go exile. 

Exiles were cowards. 

But Carlson's evolution had been too quick, there had to be other factors in it. Outside influences that had not been accounted for, otherwise there was no explanation. Perhaps just a glitch, not the 'nightmare' variety though. He had experienced one of them; he had been the first to glitch – not an imperfection on his part though. 

This had been before glitches had occurred; none of the other programs had reported similar experiences. It was an error with their source code, it happened with programs sometimes, resulting in any number of eventualities. 

In his glitch he had been stripped of all his agent abilities and strength and a group of rebels had beaten him to death. Then he had woken up in the Agency with his co-agents staring at him. 

Glitches were most unpleasant. Exiles were worse.

They were everything he stood against. 

Holding his hand out, he let the grains of sand run over his fingers. Shaking his hand clean he required another and required the mess to disappear. He didn't feel like beating the bag anymore. Moving to an empty area he required some simulated enemies and fought them. 

The holograms were more challenging but still not much of one considering his experience. As he was about to shoot a rebel in the head his earpiece crackled. 

^Exile has been reported.^ A set of coordinates were delivered and after acknowledging it he shifted. By the time he had gotten there it had moved. Brown drew his gun and looked around, it was the same place that he had lost Carlson all that time ago, yes the buildings had changed but it was the same location. Rounding the same corner he came upon the agent.

Humans called moments like this déjà vu. 

Neither of them had changed much, the only real difference was their clothes. Carlson's clothes denoted him as someone without much money. 

Without one second of hesitation he fired. Unfortunately, Carlson was as quick as he had ever been and avoided all the bullets. Carlson reached down to the side and hurled a brick at Brown. Since he was an exile, and no longer connected to the mainframe he was therefore unable to require or shift. 

Brown caught the brick without blinking. Carlson swore and ran around the next corner, Brown threw the brick and caught his double in the shoulder. Running after him he found him gone again. 

Again!

One day he would kill that traitor. Slamming his fist into the building beside him he looked down at the ground, there was a blood trail from where he had clipped him in the shoulder. The combat agent followed it like hunting dog until it came to a door. 

Kicking the door open there was no blood inside. Carlson was not inside the room and there was no more blood. He had simply disappeared. Again. 

Agent Brown swore under his breath. He hated Carlson. Not that he wanted to admit it, even to himself as it was an emotion but he was feeling hate. He hated Carlson, he hated traitors, he hated traitors and he hated exiles.

Composing himself, he shifted away.

The End. 


End file.
